A few months ago, I heard Zombie was working on the
sequel to Spec Ops and that it was looking pretty good. I
cruised over to www.zombie.com for a quick peek and I
got some pleasing news about this new game including; audio
samples from real weapons, multiplayer, 4 man ranger squads,
dynamic lighting, real world physics, and last but not least,
stealthy AI. Could this fix the problems of the first game? Well,
there's a lot of ground to cover so let?s jump right in there and find
out.

Spec Ops 2 offers you a good number of
levels, 5 campaigns (Antarctica, Korea, Pakistan, Thailand,
Germany) with a total of 26 missions which you can complete in
any order you choose. They also offer a full training course. To
help you through these levels, you have a total of 19 weapons
available, plus the usual grenades, claymores, and satchel
charges. There are even preset loadouts for your Rangers as you
can select from Infantry, Demolition, Sniper, Grenadier, Close
Quarters, and Machine Gunner. The weapons loadout screen can
be a little annoying since a lot of the time, you can't just
switch from one weapon to another without clearing your
inventory, and completely starting over from scratch. No need to
worry though as the game offers you the very cool option of
picking up your dead enemy?s weapons. Up to 3 weapons can be
carried at any time in the game. I do have a big problem with the
inability to select the number of teammates to bring with you. You
are assigned a certain number for each mission.

The game offers 3 difficulties; Private, NCO, and Officer.
Just as in the first game, all are way too hard. Even at Private this
game will be unusually difficult for a lot of players, which will do
nothing but turn you on to this game and make you want to play it
more. This game in some ways is like Rainbow Six, the baddies
seem to be mostly placed around the corners camping, and just
waiting for you to pop around the corner. In Spec Ops however,
its usually 2 shots and not 1 that will kill you as in R6.

The campaigns are all different and give you a good
variety, spanning from snowy mountains, to jungle, to desert, to a
shipyard. I have a very big problem with the Jungle levels. Many
of these levels take place in the dark and you are forced to use
night vision goggles, or (if available) your infrared sniper scope.
You move through slowly and carefully just to get shot and killed
by a guy in a bush that there is no possible way you could have seen. In my
opinion, this game really could use a quicksave feature. I think
you'll agree too on your seventh trip through mountains and into
the enemy base just to be killed by a guy sitting around the corner
as you finish up the mission.

They also offer you the ability to add random
enemies to the game, so you never know quite where they are.
There does seem to be a bug with this option on certain levels
though. When I first turned Random Enemies on, in the very first
level of the game, my team and I were attacked from all directions
by a never ending army of baddies. No matter how many we
killed they kept coming and coming. Other levels the feature
worked fine, and you never knew exactly where they would be,
but there weren't very many of them. The impression I got from
this option is 1) you are either endlessly attacked by an infinite
amount of enemies until your team is dead or 2) you have a hard
time finding bad guys at all.

I can forgive most of what I already listed, however one
unforgivable problem in this game (or any game) are problems in
the area of control and gameplay. Controls need to be very quick,
responsive, and accurate. The controls in Spec Ops 2 offer none of
these. The controls are slow, sluggish, and difficult. You'll quickly
find that you can't strafe and move forward at the same time,
which makes strafing around wide or tight corners very difficult
and dangerous. The time it takes for your character to stop
strafing, move forward, and strafe again is awful. There is about a
half second pause between movements, and it is totally
unacceptable. Looking up and down is difficult and seems to drift
off slightly to one side as you look up, making shooting people that
are up high difficult and frustrating.

You will also quickly notice that as you move forward,
you don't have any type of aiming mechanism. You can fire and
move forward, which will bring up your gun's sight, however you
must continue firing or else you will lose it again. They might
have been aiming for realism on this, but if this is the case than there
should be a walking "ready to fire" position that you'll see in any
SWAT or Special Ops team in real life. This game feels the need
to not offer this. Your ranger can stand, crouch, or go prone. Stand
and Crouch work fine, when you lay your character down is when
you hit problems. The control gets jerky, slow, and just impossible
to aim. Forget about tracking someone with a sniper rifle if you are
laying down. This is an option you will rarely use because of it?s
problems.

What about the Graphics, Sound, AI, and Multiplayer?
Well, one good thing about this game is it runs very smoothly on
my PII 450 w/ TNT2 ultra. I was able to easily run the game at
1280x1024x32 with no slowdown. The graphics are not
groundbreaking and won't compare to games such as Unreal
Tournament or Soldier of Fortune, but they get the job done. You
will definitely notice that the flashlight doesn't work. The first time
I used the flashlight, it lit up the top of a tree I wasn't even pointing
at. It also decided it likes my partner's feet, which it usually
lights up when I point at him. Never in this game has the flashlight
lit up the ground, walls, or anything of value. Sometimes it might
light up your whole character?s body, long enough for you to see
the engine?s ability to cast shadows. Or should I say attempt to
cast shadows. It is really just a bunch of black circles projected on
the background, and are actually very ugly and ineffective. The
only other complaint I have about the graphics are the weapon
models. All 19 of the guns in this game are made up of maybe 10
polygons, every weapon looks more like a rectangular block than
a gun.

The sound of this game is actually very good. If it offered
full surround and EAX effects I would have been very impressed.
Even on two channels, the sound does a very good job at putting
you in the action. The enemies yelling in foreign languages, the
gun sounds are realistic, and the bullets flying around you
definitely make your palms sweat. With a little more work this
sound would be top-notch. I wish I could say the same about the
rest of the game.

The AI of the game is awful and not really fixed since
the original Spec Ops. Your teammates will still get lost going
around a corner and they will still (although not as often) kill
themselves in strange ways. When I first started playing the game,
my partner died trying to get over a fence. They don't follow your
orders very well. You have the option of giving them orders from a
little menu you control with your mouse. They follow those orders,
however you probably won't use them much since the AI is so
horrible. They will run straight into fire and die. If you're lucky
he might kill an enemy before he gets killed.

The multiplayer section of the game works very well, although at
first I got thrown out a few times before the game started up. This only
happened the first couple of times I tried to play and hasn't happened since.
The multiplayer allows you to pick the terrorist team or the Spec Ops teams
to play as, and is pretty fun. I was luckily in the 150 ms ping range and
had no lag problems to speak of. I had no high pings to the servers so I
don't know how the game handles high pings or packet loss.

I thought the basic multiplayer included in the game was in need of the
expansion pack. All in all the multiplayer does help to add some variety to
this monotonous game. Better controls, maybe a couple of new weapons and the
expansion pack might really help to open this game up. I feel that Spec Ops
2 is not ready for release and should have been held off until Q1 2000 along
with the expansion pack, as the whole game has a very beta test feel to it.

To sum all of this up, you can learn to like this game to a
certain degree. I did occasionally have some fun working my way
through some of the levels. The control problems make the
learning curve very high, but you learn and get used to it. The
game?s repetitiveness and very high difficulty turned me off and
the other problems, big and small, kept me away. I hear rumors
that Spec Ops 3 will use the LithTech engine. Well, I can only
hope because Zombie just can't seem to get it right on their own as
far as game engines go. I couldn't and wouldn't recommend this
game to anyone for any reason, there is simply too many other
games out there that deserve your money.